The Message Is the Message

McCain's campaign for reform is very meaningful. But what does it
mean exactly?

By Andrew Ferguson

February 7, 2000
Web posted at: 12:54 p.m. EST (1754 GMT)

It's across the board," said John McCain last week, referring to
his victory in New Hampshire. "It came from all
sectors--conservatives, moderates, liberals. It was a win for the
message." His chorus of well-prepped advisers agreed. "Message is
still important," said McCain strategist Mike Murphy. "And the
McCain message is clearly the message that Republican Party
voters have embraced." In politics this kind of echo-chamber
flackery is called being on message. And as McCain and his staff
pointed their famous Straight Talk Express toward South Carolina,
the message they were on was--well, their message. The message is
their message. Or is it the other way around?

If you think you're confused, think of all those conservatives,
moderates, liberals who cast their lot with McCain last week or
who propose to do so in other states as he closes in on George W.
Bush. Small-government right-wingers, bleeding-heart lefties and
all the squishes and fence straddlers in between--none of them
agree on very much. Yet somehow they believe they have found in
the McCain message a political answer to their utterly
contradictory and mutually exclusive anxieties, crotchets, hopes
and convictions. This must be some message.

And the secret to it is this: no one, least of all McCain, can
tell you what it is. One of the neglected curiosities of this
presidential-campaign season is how remarkably substantial and
sophisticated it has been. The candidates have unloosed a
blizzard of paper. There are fact sheets on child care, four-step
plans to save Medicare, backgrounders on Medicaid reform and
transportation subsidies and the tax code's deduction for
dependent children. Down in Austin, Texas, Bush has assembled an
entire shadow government of policy wonks to translate the gaseous
cloud of his compassionate conservatism into the hard data of tax
tables and impact studies.

The exception to this eruption of specificity and detail has been
John McCain. For him, the campaign has been a seat-of-the-pants
operation, not only in its mechanics but also in its ideas. He
has mostly forsaken large-scale policy speeches in favor of
town-hall Q.s and A.s, where issues can be dealt with in
catchphrases. His few attempts at concreteness tend to collapse
in self-contradiction. He wants to use the budget surplus to
shore up Social Security and preserve it for future generations;
at the same time, he would undermine it by letting workers
deposit part of their payroll taxes in private accounts. Long an
advocate of a flat tax with minimal loopholes, McCain proposed a
tax plan riddled with loopholes for the middle class that would
make flattening the tax rates more difficult. He wants to pass
federal education funds back to the states with no strings
attached; meanwhile he would require states to institute
merit-pay programs, new teacher-hiring incentives and other
Washington-mandated reforms. He says he'll push the health-care
system toward a "free-market model," while having the Federal
Government pay for additional benefits such as prescription
drugs.

By his own declaration, McCain has always been more conversant on
the arcana of foreign and military policy than the dry detail of
domestic affairs. But here too there are ironies and
contradictions. While accusing the Clinton Administration of
allowing the military to fall into a state of perilous disrepair,
McCain says he would hold defense spending to its current level
or even reduce it. The list of advisers he would consult to help
him formulate foreign policy--Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry
Kissinger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft--sounds almost like a
board of directors for the foreign-policy establishment. He wants
to maintain the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy toward
gays. On the matters with which he's most familiar, in other
words, the revolutionary outsider looks more like an exemplar of
the status quo.

McCain's image as a revolutionary rests, instead, on the word he
repeats like a mantra: reform. For the most part, his reforms are
unspecified or constantly evolving--he has sponsored several
different versions of campaign-finance reform, for example--but to
the extent he has a message, this is it: "Government has been
taken from us. Let's go take it back."

This rhetorically extravagant message of a country hijacked by
nameless forces of evil ("special interests") may seem
far-fetched, especially in a time of such happiness and plenty.
McCain's genius has been to understand that it is precisely this
affluence and good cheer that make genuine ideas irrelevant. As
the American economy churns and rumbles and sprays money this way
and that, a message of ideological consistency would seem like
mere pedantry. Reform, on the other hand, is a rubric under which
people can toss all their small residual grievances, their
nagging unsatisfied wants, whatever they are. Medicare? Gun
control? Your failing school? Reform must be the answer. A
revolutionary who promises to keep everything essential in place
(the tax code, the military budget, the federal pension system)
while promising to change everything--take our country back!--is
the kind of revolutionary that Americans can get behind.
Conservatives, liberals, moderates, across the board.